Facebook Releases Data Center Usage Dashboard Code

Facebook is releasing the full code to the dashboard visualization tools found in their Oregon and North Carolina data centers. The two data centers use the dashboard to display, in near real-time, the power usage effectiveness (PUE) and water usage effectiveness (WUE) of the facilities. Facebook originally unveiled the public dashboards in April 2013.

"Since not all operational systems aggregate data in the same way, we’ve separated the code into two pieces: a front-end UI component and a back-end data aggregator that may be helpful for those with systems similar to ours," says Lyrica McTiernan, an engineer at Facebook and contributor to the company's Engineering Blog. "The two components work together -- or they can be used separately." Both the front-end and back-end code is available through GitHub.

Facebook has been a large proponent of open source resources for quite some time, and 2013 saw a lot of open source activity from the social networking company. From the xctool, used for automating the Xcode iOS/Mac build process, to their HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), a virtual machine used for compiling PHP-based programs, Facebook released a steady stream of open source projects.

Facebook has used the Open Compute Project to share its data center designs in the past and, as McTiernan pointed out in the April 2013 announcement, this is "the natural next step."

Rackspace helped to beta test the code before the open source release and is currently considering using it. Facebook also plans to eventually add a public data aggregator to its Sweden data center and the currently unfinished Iowa data center.

"Why are we doing this? Well, we're proud of our data center efficiency, and we think it's important to demystify data centers and share more about what our operations really look like," says McTiernan.